Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 28, 2011

Five-year-old Stockton, California resident Michael Davis has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and sometimes proved to be a disruptive influence in his class.

Seeking to ?cure? Michael of his rambunctiousness, the faculty of Rio Calaveras Elementary School arranged a meeting with Lt. Frank Gordo, a ?resource officer? assigned to the district.

At one point, according to Gordo?s account, he placed his hand on Michael. The youngster, according to Gordo, ?pushed my hand away in a batting motion, pushed papers off the table, and kicked me in the right knee.?

Rather than backing off and calming down, which is how a functioning adult would have behaved, Gordo arrested the child, zip-tying his hands and ankles and dragging him to the station, where he was charged with ?battery on a police officer.? He was also forced to undergo a psychiatric exam.

Michael, whose parents are divorced, may have emotional problems. This much should be said: Whatever ?affliction? inspired this youngster?s reflexive hostility towards a State-licensed armed bully is something I wish the rest of us would catch.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ made us free.

Willl Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 25, 2011

The Occupy protests have offered many examples of the following scenario:

Peaceful demonstrators confront riot police; individual riot policeman commits physical aggression against protester, then immediately escalates the conflict by using potentially lethal force; rather than coming to the aid of the victim, other police officers form a protective barricade around the assailant.

This approach includes penning or otherwise trapping unresisting protesters, dousing them with a dangerous chemical agent misleadingly called ?pepper spray,? and then commencing an assault.

These tactics are inspired by a doctrine described by Sociologist Patrick Gillham of the University of Idaho as ?strategic incapacitation.? Embraced by police agencies more than a decade ago, this method of crowd control is derived from what Gillham calls ?a new penology philosophy? ? that is, a punitive approach more appropriate to a prison riot than a political demonstration.

?Strategic incapacitation? is the practice of summary punishment in the name of preventing disorder, rather than dealing with threats to person or property.

The philosophical errors and occasional outrages displayed by the ?Occupy? movement notwithstanding, the methods displayed by the black-clad, armored riot police are more troubling ? if only because they clearly demonstrate that our rulers consider this to be a prison society.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 24, 2011

Cecil B. DeMille?s film The Ten Commandments is neither an authoritative history lesson nor a rigorous sermon, but it does contain at least one unassailable insight. In an early scene, a defiant Joshua, before the Exodus, tells an Egyptian overlord: ?God made men; men made slaves.? We were created to be free, not to be in bondage to those who presume to rule us.

Abraham, whom the scriptures describe as the Friend of God, was a stateless man. Through faith he upheld God?s perfect law of liberty in a world otherwise surrendered to violence and corruption. He sought to resolve property disputes peacefully, and used force only to rescue his kinsman, Lot. When the King of Sodom offered to reward Abraham with plundered property, Abraham ? invoking God?s law ? declined.

Sin is the source of bondage ? spiritual and political. James Madison pointed out that government is the largest of all reflections on fallen human nature, which includes the sinful impulse to aggress against the person and property of others. Unfortunately, rather than reining in that impulse, political government institutionalizes it.

As Abraham and other Biblical patriarchs demonstrated, it is possible to live God?s law without a political government. But every political government involves institutionalized violations of that law.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 22, 2011

Over the past decade, the FBI has created a series of controlled false-flag terrorism schemes involving informants who manipulate marginalized and powerless people ? usually, but not always, Muslims ? into committing some overt act that is described as part of a grand terrorist conspiracy.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who faces a huge and growing political crisis, appears to have adapted those strategies. On Sunday, November 20, Bloomberg triumphantly announced the arrest of 27-year-old Jose Pimentel, an unemployed blogger who has been under constant police scrutiny since 2009. A convert to Islam, Pimentel supposedly sympathized with al-Qaeda, even though officials describe him as a ?lone wolf.?

One official pointed out that Pimentel, rather than being a focused and disciplined criminal mastermind, was ?all over the place,? both in terms of his objectives and his tactics. For two years, the official acknowledged, ?The Police Department basically had an informant with this guy,? who carefully supervised him and, on previous performance, likely coached him on how to make a pipe bomb.

Whenever they need relief from a bad news cycle, the people who rule us always have at least a few patsies warming up in the bullpen. Few things provide a better PR boost than busting a phony terrorism plot.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 21, 2011

Last September, 90-year-old Willie Williams was startled to see armed men outside his Lubbock, Texas home. One of them shattered a window and apparently fired a gunshot.  The elderly man grabbed a shotgun and returned fire. In the ensuing exchange he received a gunshot wound in his throat.

Had the prowlers been common thieves, they most likely would have been driven off, thereby permitting the wounded man to call for emergency medical aid. Unfortunately, they were police officers ? which meant that the already-wounded Williams was further traumatized by being handcuffed so tightly that he endured a second injury on the way to jail. That injury was compounded by the familiar and inevitable perjury committed by the officer in the police report, which claimed that Williams had fired the first shot ? despite the fact that the original call sheet indicated that the police had shot first.

Williams, who acted in self-defense, was within his rights to use lethal force to defend himself. Yet he was charged with ?aggravated assault on a public servant.? Fortunately a grand jury declined to indict the elderly man on that charge. The police officer who shot Williams should be prosecuted, and the prosecutor who filed the charge against the victim should be removed from office.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 18, 2011

Politics is almost always an effort by power-seeking people to carve out self-serving exceptions to the Golden Rule. Democracy is the art of inducing victims of government power to focus on the question of who controls the government, rather than what it does. H.L. Mencken underscored that sobering truth with his deathless aphorism that democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it ? good and hard.

Appropriately, some of the supposed beneficiaries of Washington?s humanitarian slaughter in Iraq understand this principle far better than most Americans.

Speaking with a Reuters reporter in a Baghdad barbershop, Iraqi resident Wael al-Khafaji pointed to the military checkpoint just a few feet from the business ? one of hundreds scattered across supposedly liberated Iraq.

?Do you see this soldier in this checkpoint? He can do whatever he wants to me right now and I can't say a word. Is this democracy? What democracy are you asking me about, when my basic rights as a human being are stolen? If this is what Americans mean by democracy, let it be damned."

Americans should ponder those words as military-style checkpoints and similar police state measures proliferate across our own country.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 17, 2011

The ?legitimate? purpose of government, we are constantly told, is to protect life and property against criminal violence and fraud. If this were true, it would follow that most of those arrested by police and punished by the so-called justice system would be guilty of crimes against person and property.

According to the most recent available statistics regarding incarceration, however, people convicted of actual crimes compose a very small minority of America?s vast and growing federal prison population. Crimes of violence accounted for roughly eight percent of that total, and property crimes contributed a bit less than six percent. More than half of all inmates were convicted of non-violent drug offenses, and thirty-five percent were caged for what are called ?public order? offenses.

All told, eighty-six percent of all federal inmates committed what are called ?victimless crimes? ? that is to say, offenses not properly described as crimes at all. It is reasonable to assume that similar trends exist at the state and local level as well.

There are instances in which police act in defense of persons and property. Those are genuinely exceptional, because they are not part of their job description: The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that police have no enforceable duty to protect individual rights.

Why, then, do they exist at all?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 15, 2011

During the administration of Gerald Ford, the U.S. government supported Iran?s nuclear program. At the time, Iran was ruled by Shah Reza Pahlavi, a brutal militarist dictator whose regime was propped up by a spectacularly vicious secret police agency, and maintained a military configured for regional adventurism.

Despite concerns over nuclear proliferation, the Ford administration encouraged the Shah?s effort to develop nuclear energy as a hedge against declining oil production.

Today, the Islamic theocracy ruling the country insists that its nuclear program is a continuation of the Shah?s efforts ? which were, once again, supported by Washington ? to diversify its energy industry.

Where the Shah openly admitted in 1974 that his government was seeking to build nuclear weapons, the current regime insists that it has no intention of doing so. Yet Washington, which provided the Shah with a huge military establishment and supported his efforts to develop nuclear power, treats Iran?s current effort to develop nuclear power as a cause for war.

During the past sixty years, the U.S. has targeted Iran for a coup, propped up a vicious dictator, encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade that country, and threatened it with pre-emptive war. Given that none of this has worked, wouldn?t it be wise simply to try talking with them?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 14, 2011

China?s ruling Communist Party recently proposed revisions in its criminal code that would permit the secret detention of suspects for as much as six months. As the McClatchy News Service reports, ?Details of the detentions could be kept secret if authorities deem that informing families might `hinder? their investigation. In other words, it would be lawful to make people disappear.?

These trends are perceived as ominous indications that China ? which has become an economic dynamo ? was relapsing into authoritarian tyranny. What is truly ominous, however, is the fact that China?s rulers appear to be taking their cues from Washington, which has leap-frogged the Chinese Communist Party with respect to institutionalized abuse of criminal suspects and enemies of the State.

The use of secret search warrants, secret evidence, and even secret assassination lists has become routine in this supposedly free country. The government claims it has the power to imprison terrorist suspects even after acquittal. Torture has also been embraced as an accepted mode of interrogation and summary punishment.

There was a time, not long ago, when freedom seekers in China and other nations admired America?s example. Today they have reason to fear the example being set by the corrupt and lawless people who presume to rule us.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

November 16, 2011

U.S. District Judge Lynn Winmill has never been burdened with respect for the Constitution.

Ten years ago, at the behest of a radical environmental group called the Western Watersheds Project (or WWP) that filed an endangered species claim, Winmill ordered northern Idaho resident Verl Jones to stop irrigating his hay fields, despite the fact that the 85-year-old rancher had a long-standing and federally recognized right to use water from Otter Creek. Winmill ordered Jones to sell off assets to pay WWP?s legal fees. His rulings were overturned by the 9^th Circuit Court ? but not before the stress of the case literally killed the elderly Verl Jones.

Winmill has now ordered Boise County to impose a tax increase ? in defiance of Idaho law ? in order to pay a multi-million dollar federal judgment involving a violation of the Fair Housing Act. In the event that the Idaho State Tax Commission objects to this illegal levy, Winmill declares, Boise County should ?seek a declarative judgment or other legal remedy? against the Commission for upholding the state law.

Though his preferred attire is a judicial robe rather than a ski mask, Lynn Winmill is an armed robber unsuitable for the company of civilized people.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.